[matthew]

In a few months I'm going to be presenting a pair of one-hour tutorials on Adobe's Lightroom to my camera club. The first will be an introduction to the program, while the second - delivered a month later - will be a more in-depth and technical discussion on working with the software. So I'm trying to become an expert, but I also need to know what sort of information people with varying levels of experience and interests would want to know.

If you have any questions about Lightroom, please let me know so that I can get outside of my own comfort zone and habits with the software. I'd also really love to hear ideas about what's important to include in the two different tutorials, and what you wish someone would have told you in the beginning.

[NT73]

It depends on wether you have absolute beginners at your camera club (who then turn up)
I do not know what Lightroom is, or does, although it has been mentioned a quite a lot on shuttertalk.
I have possibly not gone any further in to this as my photography (non professional) does not IMO require it.
So tell me am I wrong?

[enviroguy]

For the last year or so, our friend Dreamingpixels (Pavel) has been encouraging me to purchase and use Lightroom. I have seen some of his demos and have been really impressed with the capabilities of that software. I have so far hesitated to purchase because of the cost. (I have a wish list for other gagets.) I have used some other RAW converters, including Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop Elements (that I did buy). Pavel suggested that the converter in Elements did almost as much as Lightroom, but I think he is mistaken, having played a bit with a demo version of Lightroom some time ago. So, what more does Lightroom do in the workflow?

(At least Pavel has convinced me to shoot everything in RAW format and have a ball with postprocessing I've just cracked the 600 page manual for Elements.)

.....Dennis

[matthew]

NT, I'm not sure what sort of mix there will be. Certainly there tutorial will attract people who are interested in Lightroom, but there will be a lot of people who have come for the evening in general, or wanted to see the items that started the night and were too polite to leave.

Dennis, Pavel is right in that the core of Lightroom is Adobe Camera Raw, which is available with the latest version of Elements and Photoshop alike. So the processing engine itself isn't the real reason to look at Lightroom.

Lightroom has a couple of significant differences between it and Elements/Photoshop.

First of all, Lightroom is designed for photographers, so it's a workflow application: it starts its job when the image is still on the memory card, and takes the image all the way through to its final output. It's a 'digital asset management' system with the raw converter as a final step, not a pixel-level editor with the raw conversion as a preliminary step. There's still a role for those pixel-editor programs, and LR2 does a good job of integrating PS-CS3 into its DAM system. Someone joked that Lightroom has turned photoshop into a plug-in, and it's almost true.

The other difference is that Lightroom is a new program with a straightforward purpose, and doesn't have the layers and layers of complexity that photoshop (or even elements) has. Lightroom 2 has lost a bit of the simplicity of the original, but I'd still call it a reasonably intuitive program. Photoshop gives you anywhere from a few to a few dozen different ways to do each task, but with Lightroom it's a straightforward tool set, and it doesn't matter which order you use them. All of the changes you make are simply recorded as instructions, and all of those instructions are calculated and executed in the best possible order when you export or print the file. Imagine never having to save your work again, and being able to change any decision you've made with no ill effects, even months or years later.

[enviroguy]

Hi, Matthew!

Thanks for taking the time to craft your explanation. As I understand it, Lightroom2 and Photoshop/Elements can create much the same results (in somewhat different manners) from a particular file. It would be interesting to see the same RAW file processed by both programs. Perhaps this could be something you could illustrate in your upcoming seminar(s)......Dennis

P.S. I'll have to wait a while to buy any more software or anything else. I just bought a new DSLR today. I'll need a few months to play with it before I take it on vacation in December.